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May 05, 2017

Pitting Parents Against Parents

The Escalating Efforts to Silence Vaccine Safety Debate

By Alison Fujito

It’s one thing to recommend something you believe in. It’s quite another to demand that everyone else believe in it as well. Add hostility, politics, lobbyists, and an industry with a long history of dishonesty, and the result is the antithesis of the founding principles of this country.

Last month, Cosmopolitan posted a very disturbing opinion piece by a lobbyist for vaccine mandates, attorney Jinny Suh. Ms. Suh is the creator and leader of the activist group “Immunize Texas” which she terms a “grass-roots community group.” It’s actually a branch of “Immunize USA,” which is funded by vaccine companies GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Pfizer, and vaccine inventor and industry spokesman Paul Offit, among others.

The article is liberally sprinkled with pejoratives and thinly-veiled accusations directed towards those who don’t agree with the author. The end result leaves a strong impression encouraging fear, repression, and hatred against anyone wanting to maintain the right to determine which invasive medical procedures they are willing to have performed on their children, and when.

Empathy or hostility? Ms. Suh begins the article with several paragraphs telling us how she is an incredibly supportive and sympathetic person. And maybe she is.

One would expect that a sympathetic parent whose children were lucky enough NOT to suffer adverse vaccine reactions, would lobby for research on causes, prevention, and treatment of such harm. After all, over 10,000 claims are filed every year with the adversarial, problematic “Vaccine Court.”

Nobler efforts to help children might include fundraising for families of children who suffered truly catastrophic reactions, requiring lifelong 24/7 care not covered by insurance, especially for those who were unaware that the government compensation system even exists until well after the short three-year statute of limitations. In fact, there are many such families in Ms. Suh’s home state.

Instead, the remainder of the article reads as an attack on those who criticize or even question vaccine safety, starting with her incongruous announcement that “it’s time to stop acting like not vaccinating is a parenting decision.”

Let’s remember the facts here:

Vaccination is an invasive medical procedure.

Medical procedures may be declined by the patient.

Medical procedures on infants and children ARE PARENTING DECISIONS.

Media mantra Dismissing all who would disagree with her, Ms. Suh ignores 73,454 reports of serious reactions associated with vaccines from 1989 through April of this year, and 6,469 reported deaths in the same time period. She insists that vaccines—all vaccines— are safe and effective, and basically demands that everyone who has not already had an “approved” medical reaction agree to fully vaccinate their children. Links to three articles, none of which prove safety or efficacy, are provided in an effort to justify such a drastic demand.

As responsible parents, we cannot ignore legitimate reports of vaccine-associated systemic harm and submit unquestioningly to such demands because of three erroneous articles. One can easily find three articles claiming safety and efficacy of various medications in pill form, but that wouldn’t support a claim that “pills are safe and effective,” and it wouldn’t necessarily prove safety and efficacy of those particular pills. Vioxx and thalidomide are only two of many examples of FDA-approved medications that turned out to be deadly. Vaccines, classified as “biologicals” rather than “drugs” aren’t held to the strict standards of science and tightly-controlled clinical trials that Vioxx was before it received—and maintained—approval from both the government and our medical system.

The author links to a CNN news report with video, which wrongly claims that “thimerosal does not cause any difficulty.” This is blatantly false: thimerosal is strongly associated with phonic and motor tics, which are neurological disorders, as well as problems with attention and executive functioning. In other words, thimerosal causes difficulties.

CNN here also claims in error that only “trace amounts” of thimerosal are in influenza vaccines. Again, this is untrue: approximately 30% of flu vaccines today still contain 25 micrograms of thimerosal in each dose; the CDC’s chart shows that only FDA-licensed influenza vaccine recommended for children under the age of three is FluZone Quadrivalent, which contains a 12.5 mcg/dose of thimerosal. Not only is that NOT a trace amount, but it’s being given to the population most susceptible to harm from thimerosal. CNN got both of these important facts completely wrong.

In contrast, back before the vaccine manufacturers were permitted to advertise on, and, for all practical purposes, own and control commercial TV, there was this special news report in 1979 on the government cover-up of harm from swine flu shots, as well as this one, in 1982, “DPT: Russian Roulette.”

There is a well-documented history of cover-up of harm from vaccines in this country; this is in no way refuted by CNN’s misinformed (at best) claims of safety.

The third effort to convince us of the supposed safety of vaccines is a disturbingly vitriolic article by the controversial Brian Deer, who, amidst accusations of his own questionable ethics, falsely claimed that Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s study misrepresented the medical status of the children involved—falsely, because those children’s parents have gone on record rebutting and criticizing Deer, and supporting Wakefield.

“This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”

Ms. Suh makes entirely unsupported accusations against those who question vaccine safety, ascribing thoughts, values, and motives to thousands of people she’s never met. She uses these mistaken assumptions as reason to urge readers to support vaccine mandates—but this is tantamount to mandating the same medication for the entire population. Ms. Suh is not a medical doctor, and should not be advising others on what medical procedures are appropriate for themselves or for their children. Usurping the right of the individual to make medical decisions is in direct defiance of the Nuremburg Code.

Many parents questioning vaccine safety have already vaccinated their children and observed serious adverse reactions, often documented by their doctors. Some even filed claims with the US Department of Health and Human Services, and—against all odds—won compensation for their losses.

Parents whose own children didn’t have such reactions know others who did. A quickly increasing number of parents recognize genetic susceptibilities in their families, and choose to delay or even decline one or more vaccines, as is their right.

It’s chilling when those who have never seen a child’s terrible vaccine reaction mock and threaten parents who have. The insistence that we ignore these serious issues is troubling. Demanding that others adhere to the CDC’s poorly tested vaccination schedule—regardless of the serious and unresolved safety issues—is misguided and short-sighted considering the tremendous impact to individuals, to families, and to society.

Any parent who would demand that all children submit to a medical intervention that carries with it the known reality that some will sustain catastrophic brain damage or death in order to protect her child does not grasp the monstrous enormity of the request.

A parent that understood would never ask.

—Louise Kuo Habakus

Reality checkMs. Suh claims to support evidence-based science, so here is evidence-based science that directly addresses her misunderstandings of the facts:

Many of today’s vaccines don’t actually prevent the vaccinated individual from colonizing and transmitting the disease in question. This is true of pertussis, as already noted, polio and diphtheria.

Rotavirus is transmissible primarily via the fecal/oral route, where virus from tainted feces would have to make their way into someone’s mouth in order for them to be infected. If good hygiene cannot be mandated, neither can one make an ethical case for mandating invasive medical procedures for the same result.

It’s troubling that Ms. Suh, even with two degrees in biology, does not know that vaccinating for these illnesses will not protect others. Even more disturbing is the possibility that she does know.

There is a balance between benefit and harm. This is a value judgement, and no authority can make that judgement better than those who are offered the intervention. This is a general guiding principle in medical ethics, not specific to this debate.